This week, we released a new product called TurnKey Vault NAS (Network Attached Storage). The TurnKey Vault NAS is a cloud-based backup service that can be mounted as a local hard drive on your computer for easy (and extremely secure) drag-and-drop backups. NAS services have been needed for a long time now, especially as businesses have become more and more remote. People need to be able to share files on the go. Since almost all of our data has gone digital, the need for secure backups is greater than it has ever been. Cloud NAS services make file sharing and secure remote backups possible, but they have traditionally been inaccessible to regular business owners who may not know the technical ins and outs of server management. That is why we are so excited to be able to offer a simple, easy-to-use Network Attached Storage service direct to you from the TurnKey Cloud.

TurnKey Vault NAS Features

More and more businesses rely on cloud services every day, but not all cloud services are created equal. TurnKey NAS is universally accessible (via FTP, SCP, SFTP, Rsync, NFS or Samba connections) and cross platform (PC, MAC, Linux and more). TurnKey NAS is also compatible with every backup software package that supports direct-to-disk backups. It’s perfect for secure backups and file sharing.

Protect Your Business from Catastrophic Loss

The biggest fear for every business owner is a complete server meltdown resulting in catastrophic loss. Can your business afford to lose all of your data? Ours can’t. Easy drag-and-drop backups are now possible with TurnKey NAS, and we are advising all of our clients to take advantage of the service. Backing up directly from your desktop is the easiest and fastest way to make consistent copies of the files you use (and update) most. Make backups as you go, as you need them, and never lose another day’s work again.

Share Files From Anywhere

With TurnKey NAS, you and your colleagues can access files on-the-go, from any smart device, from anywhere in the world. Forgot your presentation? No problem. Lost a disk? Just log-in and download. Not only is this a critical service for any business, it is a critical service for you, personally. Save yourself embarrassment, extra work and stress. Streamline your business data, and protect your most valuable business asset: your hard work.

LEARN MORE ABOUT TURNKEY VAULT NAS, AND SIGN UP!!!

We could not be more excited to announce the arrival of our new email marketing software, TurnKey Newsletter! TurnKey Newsletter is going to change the way our clients do business. There are about a million incredible features (which I will get into below) but most important of all is the ability this software provides to learn about your customers—from how they read your emails to their shoe size—seriously. The better you know your customers, the better you can target your products and services to their needs, and the more successful your business will become.

TurnKey Newlsetter and Your Bottom Line: A One-to-One Ratio

Sometimes you can hear something a million times and you still need to hear it again. For example, you know you’re supposed to drink eight glasses of water every day. You hear it on T.V. You read it in the paper. But do you do it? I sure don’t. It’s the same thing for email marketing. Everyone talks about how important it is—how dramatically it can improve profit, how much it affects customer retention and customer trust—yet so many companies still haven’t started doing it. Part of the reason is that it’s intimidating. What solution do you choose? Will you be able to figure out how to use it? I think many businesses are reluctant to try something new that they don’t fully grasp, especially when they are worried about alienating customers or being called spammers. That is why TurnKey Newsletter is so incredibly exciting. It could not be easier to use!

TurnKey Newsletter: Overflowing with Top-of-the-Line Features

TurnKey Newsletter includes beautiful, professional design templates, an easy what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, CAN-spam compliant automation (so you don’t get flagged, and your emails get through), email feedback and surveys (so you know what your customers are thinking), and personalization options (so every email is addressed personally—as if you sent each one individually). You can read more about all of the features here: http://turnkeynewsletter.com.

TurnKey Newsletter’s Emails: Always Look the Way You Designed Them

One of the things we are most proud of with TurnKey Newsletter is its compatibility with every major email client out there. Many email marketing products look great at first glance—you can edit templates, add images, and personalize just fine—but when your customers actually open your email, it looks nothing like the email you designed. Text is too big, images get resized, code is visible—it’s a complete mess. Your customers aren’t going to think, “hmm, wow, their email marketing software sucks,” they’re going to think, “hmm, wow, this company is incredibly unprofessional and I don’t think I should be trusting them with my business.” It’s sad, and it’s true. Don’t stake your reputation on a shoddy email marketing tool.

Trust TurnKey Newsletter. Really. It rules.

Reselling web hosting is a potentially lucrative business with many advantages. Well, most importantly, you don’t have to worry about hardware. Partnering with a reputable web hosting business that owns their own datacenter (i.e. TurnKey Internet) will allow you to provide reliable services to your clients while you receive stellar support and 100% uptime. But providing the server space is only one small part of a successful reseller business. You have to market your business too, and that’s no small task. As a very wise CEO once told me, “Products don’t make a business. Sales and marketing make a business.” So how do you effectively market your reseller business without spending all your capital on advertising? Good question, self! Allow me to elucidate…

Press Releases

Press releases are a powerful tool for marketing your company. While press releases work best for real newsworthy items, even routine product announcements and promotions can benefit from a formal press release distributed through the right channels. The best part is that press releases don’t have to cost you anything more than the time it takes to write them.

• Advantages

  Bloggers, journalists and online news outlets are always on the lookout for new content. Getting your press release listed is great for exposure, and it builds your website’s backlinks, which is great for SEO. If your release contains newsworthy information that extends beyond the web hosting arena, you could get picked up by print publications. This is an excellent way to build your company’s credibility and to reach an audience that may not be keeping tabs on industry-only news.

• Distribution

  There are several traditional (and free) methods for distributing press releases, and a few more creative non-traditional ones. First, submit your release to all of the online news outlets you can find. This can be time consuming, as many of them require you to register before you can submit news, but the effort is worthwhile. It may be onerous the first time around, but if you save your registration information, subsequent releases will be easier and faster. Second, notify your clients of your releases via your email newsletter. If you don’t have a newsletter yet, you should get on that, and fast, because they are invaluable marketing tools (more on this below). Third, submit your release to all of your local newspapers and radio stations. It might sound old school, but getting listed in print or mentioned on the radio will be a real feather in your company’s cap.

• Keywords

  Load your press release with SEO-friendly keywords and phrases. The more specific your keywords and phrases are, the better, for example: there are millions of companies using the keywords “web hosting” but not nearly as many using the keywords “New York web hosting professionals.” If you target your demographic with your keywords, you’ll maximize traffic from that demographic. And try to remember the rule: one to two keywords per 100 words.

• Paid Releases

  There are several companies that offer to distribute your press releases for a fee. Typically, the fee is $50-$250 and includes submission to all the major search engines and news outlets online. We have found paid releases to be beneficial for truly newsworthy releases, especially those that involve a new product or service that we know people will be excited about. The bottom line here is sales. If we have a release we think will bring in sales, we’re willing to spend some money to make sure our customers see it.

Blogs

What I’m doing here… right now… and here… is writing a company blog. This blog increases traffic to TurnKey Internet because it is regularly updated, searchable, indexed content that keeps us at the top of search results. The more I talk about TurnKey Internet’s top-notch web hosting products and services, the more easily we will be found by customers searching for top-notch web hosting products and services. It’s simple. It works. Try it!

Specials

Specials, sales and coupons attract attention. Everyone wants a deal. Everyone wants to pay less for something that used to cost more. You can advertise your specials via all the social networks (in which you should already have an account for your company). You can also include specials and promotions on your blog, with keyword-filled content that highlights the amazing features included in your special. If your special is really…well… special, you can write up a press release.

Email Newsletters

You have undoubtedly heard about the marketing power of email newsletters. If you haven’t started one yet, check out TurnKeyNewsletter.com, our one-stop email newsletter shop. Newsletters are ideal tools for sending out company updates, promotions, specials, etc. They are also critical tools for building customer trust and loyalty. An active company that has a lot going on is a successful company—at least in the eyes of your customers. Finding the right email newsletter software can be a real challenge. Many of the better known products out there have major bugs that will hurt your company’s image (the opposite of what you’re going for, obviously). That is why we have just released our very own, superior, incredible, action-packed email newsletter software. Check it out here: http://turnkeynewsletter.com. Also, stay tuned for a whole entire blog post dedicated to this new must-have marketing tool.

Today, spam is a fact of life. Because of the daily spam deluge (and those over-zealous anti-spam systems) many email communications require a follow up phone call… “did you get my email?”

You may not realize it, but if you send emails through your web hosting server or virtual server and operate a web hosting business, web development business or host your email with a web hosting company, you have likely had some trouble getting your emails through. Often the reason is that your server has been used to send spam without your knowledge. Most of today’s web hosting companies employ automated protection to stop such things, and catch abuse before it gets out of hand. But spammers are getting more clever and an increasing number of stealth spamming techniques can bypass these systems.

Many web hosting companies resell web hosting, and their resellers (unbeknownst to them) send out spam. This can result in the blacklisting of the entire server, and everyone on it, which will keep most (if not all) emails sent from the server from ever reaching their destinations. Of course, it is the web host’s responsibility to carefully monitor their clients and web sites on their server(s) to make sure this never happens. Traditionally, this hasn’t been too difficult. Today’s modern web hosting systems employ advanced abuse tracking and header info in every email making it easy to catch and stop this type of abuse before it becomes a problem.

Lately, however, this has become a lot harder. There is a new wave of spam abuse that hides under the radar, bypassing the web server’s normal email system(s) by opening up a small cgi program, which then operates as a small mail sending server, which then floods spam out onto the Internet. Unfortunately, none of the traditional monitoring systems are able to detect this sort of stealth spamming. Naturally, for this reason, it has become very popular.

Fortunately, here at TurnKey, we’ve figured out a fix for web hosts and developers using cPanel (this will work on other servers, such as Plesk and DirectAdmin as well). Our fix will stop stealth spam dead in its tracks! Until it is a built-in a feature in all hosting companies’ server offerings, make sure you ask your web hosting company to set this up for your server. Alternatively, you can pick a web hosting company that takes care of it themselves (like TurnKey Internet).

First, login to your cPanel server via the unix shell and install CSF firewall. Follow the usual instructions here:

mkdir /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src
wget http://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz
tar xfz csf.tgz
cd csf
./install.sh

On a cPanel based server, all the default settings are what you want, with 2 exceptions:

Open the configuration file in your favorite text editor (/etc/csf.conf) and change the following lines:

TESTING = “1” change to TESTING = “0”

NEXT:  you need to change 2 more lines, the SMTP_BLOCK and SMTP_ALLOWLOCAL to the following values:

SMTP_BLOCK = “1”

SMTP_ALLOWLOCAL = “0”

This will block outbound emails from anyone other than the mail server software, and prevent any unauthorized access to the mail daemon from local scripts.  Your web hosting clients, and web pages will still be able to send email like before (they use a proper method of communicating to the mail daemon already, this above trick is just to block stealth spammers from working).

restart the firewall by typing:

/etc/init.d/csf restart

If all goes well your server will now be protected by a firewall with an added check to prevent spammers from sending emails that avoid the normal php_mail or other local mail sending method (which lets you track and log all emails, put in abuse headers by default, etc.).

Next time on Ask the Expert, we will show you how to optimize your server to really cut down on abuse from spammers.

One of the biggest challenges for any web hosting company is reducing the rate of churn. Churn, or turn-over, is the rate at which customers cancel services. In the web hosting industry, churn can be alarmingly high, especially when economic times are difficult and customers are paying month-to-month. But, while all the big web hosting companies spend thousands of dollars getting customers in the door, really tackling the problem of churn is something many fail to do well. Fortunately, there are a few tried and true techniques for retaining customers and reducing churn that every web host could benefit from implementing.

Immediate Follow-Up

Every cancelation request is an opportunity. If you have an automated billing system for your company, you can start by scheduling an email cancellation message to send out to every customer that cancels her services. Compose a friendly message that politely asks why the customer cancelled. Ask if she was unhappy with your products or services. If you receive a response, consider it an open door. Send another email, offering to significantly reduce her monthly bill. Making less money is better than making no money. If you don’t receive a response, schedule another email for a week or two after the initial cancellation. In your second email, offer specials or deep product discounts designed to entice her back to your business. Make it an offer she can’t refuse. Don’t give up. A previous customer is an extremely valuable lead. Chances are good, if you’re consistent, polite and solicitous, that customer will think of you the next time she needs web hosting. Customer loyalty is a powerful thing. Make the most of it.

Appeal to the Businessman

One tactic I have found extremely effective is to appeal to the logical businessman in our customers. Web hosting is unique in that it is the portal through which our clients reach their clients. Without a website, most businesses will fail nowadays. Sometimes a phone call with a simple sales pitch works wonders. Not only is it harder to say no over the phone, a convincing voice explaining how important it is to maintain your business presence online goes a long way. Pair that with an unbeatable offer for discount services, and reel that client right back in.

Take it from the Salesman

A good salesman can convince anybody of anything. But when you have a great product with great service at a great price, you don’t have to be the best salesman in the world, you just have to tell it like it is. Get your message out there and be consistent. Like I’m always saying, success and hard work are the same thing.

Help Your Customers Succeed

According to a whole lot of industry experts, the main reason businesses fail online is bad marketing. You can’t sell something nobody knows about. It may seem obvious, but most hosting companies don’t go the extra mile to help their customers market their services and they lose customers because of it. Give your customers tips about how to get noticed. Put together an e-book full of marketing research and ideas. If your customers are successful, you will be successful. This is also a no-brainer when it comes to building brand loyalty. If you help someone make money, they are not likely to forget it.